First
of Italian director Mattei and writer/AD Claudio Fragasso's premier
batch of basic, workman-like, charming and utterly entertaining
knockoffs of much better made knockoffs, shot around the former
Apocalypse Now sets in Pagsanjan, and featuring Reb Brown as a
typically shirtless, bemuscled Spaghetti Rambo named Ransom, an
American commando left for dead behind North Vietnamese lines by the
snake-like Colonel Radek (Christopher Connelly, also in Ruggero
Deodato's Filipino-shot Raiders Of Atlantis [1983]) and rescued by
sympathetic villagers in a former French mission under the frazzled
alcoholic Le Duc (Antonio Margheriti's favoured "old man"
character actor Alan Collins, aka Luciano Pigozzi). Once rescued, he
implores Radek and his former commando leader Major Harriman (Mike
Monty) to send him back behind enemy lines to confirm rumours of two
Russians helping the VC, in return for liberating the villagers.
Instead Ransom finds his friends, including a young woman and boy,
massacred, and is captured by the bald Russian giant Jakoda (The
Bronx Executioner's Alex Vitale) and beautiful cohort Olga (underused
Italian starlet “Loes Kamma”/Louise Kamsteeg), who intend to
break his spirit and exploit his "war machine" reputation
in their propaganda war against the West - he's strung up, beaten
with poles, burnt with oil lamps, and trapped with the fly-covered
corpse of his former cellmate, American POW Boomer (David Brass).
Naturally a VC camp can't hold Ransom and he breaks out in a flurry
of exploding huts and machine gun blasts before facing off against
Jakoda in what I call the film's "Bruno Moment", the
jaw-unhinging tangent present in every Mattei knockoff, and in Strike
Commando, the sight of two shirtless no-necks butting heads and
kicking each other in the balls, before Ransom punches him over a
waterfall (yelling "Americanskiiiiii!!!" all the way down)
and unleashing a primal "Whoaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!!!!!" Bruno's
American cast is uniformly decent, as is Vitale, who Mattei clearly
envisages as his own Richard Kiel (even down to Jakoda's ragged metal
dentures!), and the Filipino regulars are also on parade - Juliet
Lee, a Chinese-Filipino actress later in Bruno's Double Target (1987)
and production manager on Claudio's Zombi 4: After Death (1988), is
Jakoda's black-bereted VC crony who gets to kick the living Jesus out
of Ransom; Jim Gaines Jr, his bright red headband recognizable
through the chopper's windows at 200 metres, plays Radek's radio
operator, and Michael Welborn makes a brief appearance as a GI.
Followed by an in-name-only follow-up.

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.